Sixty-five percent of IT leaders rank Big Data architects as the most difficult role to fill. Data scientists (48 percent) and data modelers (43 percent) round out the top three most difficult to fill positions.

Variety, the dimension of Big Data dealing with the different forms of data, hinders organizations from deriving value from Big Data the most, according to 45 percent of IT leaders. Velocity (speed of data) is next at 31 percent, followed by Volume (amount of data) at 24 percent.

The application of Big Data is happening in a number of business areas. Eighty-one percent of leaders view operations and fulfillment as priority areas within the next 12 months. This was followed by customer satisfaction (53 percent), business strategy (52 percent), governance/risk/compliance (51 percent) and sales/marketing (49 percent).